The intention of bringing all of my digital media into one centralised location for ease of:

• Viewing
• Sharing
• Administration
• Back-up

This will be a lounge room media centre style PC so it must be silent (if that's possible), look good, have a large amount of storage and contain high quality components. The Media Box will be playing downloaded movies and TV shows aswell as recording free to air TV, MP3 music and viewing digital photos. The project is due for completion by the end of August....money permitting.

We have aimed at getting the best possible parts at the best possible price in order for us to get the best bang for our buck so to speak.

• Case: XSonic XBox - Has clear windows top to sides, miniATX, and it has a stylish black finish
• CPU: Intel Pentium D 3.0GHZ - Low cost with a big cache, should do nicely decoding/encoding DivX's for us
• Mobo: Gigabyte GA-945GZM - miniATX, SATA2, DDR2 and Gigabit LAN
• RAM: Corsair 2GB DDR2 Value Pack - No need for gaming RAM for this box
• GFX Card: XFX GeForce 8500GT 256MB - Should work nicely on the big screen
• HDD's: 250GB + 500GB SATA2 Western Digital - We need big storage but no need to spend a fortune
• Optical: An LG 18x Dual-Layer DVD drive - Good quality and good price aswell
• Sound Card: Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio - The leaders in the sound business
• PSU: Corsair HX-520 Modular - Only the cables you need to use, super quiet
• Fan: Nexus Real Silent 120mm case fan - Very stylish with black casing and white blades, 22.8dB
• Input Devices: Logitech diNOVO Edge Wireless Keyboard - Looks awsome and with a touch pad so no mouse needed

At this stage the speakers and HDTV tuner are undecided. The box will also be running Vista Ultimate to take advantage of the inbuilt Media Center. Finally to tidy things up, inside the case we have gone for a Rounded IDE Cable, UV Red for the Optical Drive and 2 UV Red Sata Cables for the HDD's. These with the modular PSU should keep the air flowing through the case.

The media box has been up and running now for a month and I must admit that the whole project has been a success. It's now so much easier to watch a downloaded TV show or movie, we play more music when we're cooking and just out on the lounge reading the paper and it's great to have another easy avenue to access the internet.

At this stage I'm unable to get the TV tuner working correctly, I think it's due to the aerial splitter I'm using at the wall. So I'm going to buy a better quality one and hopefully that will fix the issue so we can start to record some local TV.

I must admit that the cost of the project blew out a bit as I went from a box that would get the job done to a box that looks and performs a lot better and the quality Logitech speakers really tipped the scales to the expensive side. The final price tag for all components was a staggering $2,014.50.

Again please checkout the Gallery for some pics of the build and I'm already planning a new project which I hope to start by the end of the year...money permitting as per usual ;)

The speakers have arrived, after much deliberation we decided to go with a set of Logitech Z5500D 5.1 speakers. These babies kick some serious butt in the sound department punching out a healthy 505 Watts....this includes a 188 Watt 10inch Subwoofer. The damm box these came in was so heavy I nearly did a hernia carrying it up the stairs!
You can find out some detailed specs for the speakers here.

The media box has been built. The build took a few hours to complete, thanks to the stupid amount of windows updates and some applications not running under Vista, but we got there.
All of the components went in smoothly, I'm very glad that I changed the sound card to a low profile card in the X-Fi Extreme Audio as I'm fairly certain that the Audigy4 would of had no chance of fitting into the case. Lucky for me that the graphics card slid in with millimeters to spear. The modular Corsair PSU works wonders in having only the bare minimum amount of cables cluttering up the case. Speaking of cables a good 30 odd mins were spent trying to tidy up those cables as best we could, which in my opinion was time well worth spent. Anyways please check out the gallery for my pics of the build.
Oh the last piece of the project is on back order....the speakers.

Yes I'm a weak minded fool, I crumbled under the pressure and the credit card got dusted of and brought into action. We purchased all the remaining components, which includes:

• The XFX Graphics Card
• 500GB SATA2 HDD
• The Logitech diNovo Edge Keyboard
• The Corsair 520w PSU
• And we decided on the Compro U2700 Hybrid TV Box

We can now begin the build process...I'll take some pics along the way ;)

Off we go to PC Shopper again for another two parts, the CPU and the Sound Card. The Sound Card, a Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio wasn't my first choice of sound card, my originally planed card was the Audigy 4 but I had the feeling that the Audigy 4 would be way to big for the little XBox case so I went searching for an alternative. The X-Fi is Creative's new Audio processor, which has supposedly outstanding Audio capabilities....which is exactly what we want for our movies and music. The CPU is the 3.0GHZ Pentium D 925 processor, this an excellent CPU which will serve us with the necessary grunt for encoding and decoding AVI's, etc. Not many more parts to go...getting itchy feet at this stage ;)

That time of the week has rolled around again which means more parts for the media box. This time around we've gone and ordered the mobo which is the Gigabyte GA-945GZM. This mobo has enough features to do the job that's required of it, I do agree that it is pretty much at the bottom of the scale in terms of the speed of RAM it can support but this isn't a gaming rig so it shouldn't hurt us in the long term. Speaking of RAM we had an unscheduled purchase last week, with the price of the Corsair RAM dropping significantly end result was that we wanted to ensure that we didn't miss out so the purchase was made.

It's pay day so that means we get to order acouple of new parts for the media box. We've gone for the 250GB Western Digital HDD and the LG DVD Drive. This is the first of two hard drives that will be going into the box. My intention for this drive will be to partition it into 3 seperate partitions: one to hold the OS approx 20GB in size, the second to hold Digital Photos about 50GB in size and the third to hold MP3's about 150GB.

The project is under way with the first parts already obtained... the Case.
I currently already use the Xbox case in another role on my network and I was realy impressed with how simple a design the case is. The clear panels on the top and sides add a bit of the case mod feel to it. I've opted to swap out the supplied PSU and fan for a more silent variety, as we don't want a server in the lounge room... it may annoy the misses to much ;)
I've also ordered the Fan and the Cabels from one of my fav online stores... PC Case Gear.